Home Cooking from a Mother's Kitchen

April 16, 2005

After the tsunami, the whole world was worried about how thousands of people suddenly homeless would manage until they could get back on their own feet. How would they be sheltered? How could they eat, with neither cooking facilities nor the money to buy food?

Immediately after the tsunami, hundreds of government agencies, ngos, relief organizations, religious groups, and even individuals stepped forward to help. The tsunami of the 26th of December 2004, it has been said, drew unprecedented compassionate action from all over the world.

Now it is more than three months later, and many who first came forward have exhausted their funds or time or volunteers, or have moved on to help in some other worthy cause. Only a few are still serving the tsunami affected.

The M. A. Math in Kerala, India, is among those few. A villager who has lost everything put it this way: “If Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi, founder of the Math) hadn’t been there, we’d be dead now. We’d have starved, or rioted. She took care of us the first day and she’s still taking care of us.”

Indeed Amma’s organization is still taking care of people in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, and other tsunami-affected parts of India. On a long island just off the west coast of Kerala, you find the Math, headquarters of Amma’s various educational and charitable institutions. The Math grounds were inundated during the tsunami, but from the first wave onwards, residents and visitors were involved in rescue and relief work: they pulled drowning people out of the water, ferried crowds across the backwaters to the mainland, allocated three institutions of higher education for immediate shelters, and by dinnertime that first night were feeding the refugees.

The feeding continues to this day. It has to. The people still can’t manage on their own.

So every day, three times a day, the Math sends out eight trucks and vans to deliver cooked meals to ten thousand people. That’s 30,000 meals a day. For 112 days now, and still continuing.

When we say “the Math sends”, we can lose sight of what goes into this incredible and sustained feeding venture. We should say, “the people send.” Let’s see the people:

Starting at about 3:30 in the morning (not many hours after the last pots from the night before have been cleaned), people gather to prepare ten thousand breakfasts. Brahmacharinis (women renunciates) and village women volunteers (and sometimes their children) sit on the floor or at tables in a big hall and chop mountains of vegetables.

In March and April, here, it is hot and humid; people who have fans run them all night long and still perspire. If the kitchen has cooled down at all in the night, it will now grow almost unbearably hot when the cooks light gas burners and begin cooking the farina-like mixture that goes into a traditional Kerala breakfast of upama.

Once breakfast is ready, men (volunteers from the island villages as well as brahmacharis) load the huge serving vessels full of upama (along with morning chai, or sweet tea) into the trucks and vans, and soon these vehicles head out to the eighteen food counters all up and down the island—and one school, where 48 children get breakfast before their classes start. The people in their temporary shelters, broken houses, thatch huts, hear breakfast coming—it sounds just like lunch and dinner: men’s strong voices are singing loud enough to almost drown out the truck engines!

The enthusiasm the food delivery people seem to feel makes a positive start to the morning. As they unload big serving vessels at each food counter, hungry people open their tiffins and begin to move close to the counter. There, local volunteers, both men and women, and householder women residents from the ashram are ready, spoons and ladles in hand, to serve the food, to pour the tea.

“Do you like this work?” we asked one of the women.

“Yes. It always feels good to serve people food.”

She was one of the ashram ammumars, or grandmothers. How much of her life had she spent preparing and serving food for her husband and children, and then no doubt the grandchildren? Now she serves a bigger family, and feels good about it.

Children do what children see: in the Alappad Panchayat, they see people joining together to help each other, and they want to get involved, too:

Back at the ashram, cooking pots have been washed, more vegetables have been chopped, rice has been steaming, and lunch is nearly ready. Good thing, too, since by the time the trucks return, having collected the empty serving vessels, it is time to wash the vessels and refill them. This time it will be rice, vegetable curry, and sambar (a traditional spicy “soup” that is spooned over the rice and curry).

Again the food trucks will go out, the men in the back will sing, the people will gather, the ashramites and villagers will work together to will serve, and the empty vessels will be taken home. The villagers might take rest after the nourishing main meal. But back at the kitchen, there is no time for rest: more vegetables have been chopped, rice has been boiled in lots of water to make kanji, a rice gruel, a spicy vegetable sauce has been prepared, and it’s time to wash the serving vessels and refill them and send them out again. This time, the meal is very simple: kanji with a scoop of curry. People crowd near the truck, and the men who loaded the vessels become the servers, spooning the gruel into the plates and tiffins the people raise high:

Taking care of the food needs of the ashram has always been a full-time commitment of time, preparation space, and personnel in the kitchen. Now, with the 30,000 extra meals a day, full-time has moved into over-time.

Over-time pay is rendered in how people feel when they take care of each other.

By Janani
Correspondent, Amritapuri
16 April 2005

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